Brits who have a Lloyds Avios Rewards credit card have been urged to check their statements

Many of the fraudulent payments appear to have been made in the US in the last two weeks.

Mr Burgess told the Sun Online that he was first alerted to the breach by the massive amount of comments on his website.

He said: “Many readers had fraudulent transactions from shops in the US charged to their Lloyds Avios cards.

“It’s quite serious as these are not online transactions, but real transactions in physical shops.

“This means real plastic cards were made to match the number of their cards.”

Mr Burgess pointed out that Lloyds was not responsible for the breach but that the bank should have warned at least warned its customers.

What should you do if your card’s been lost or stolen?

HERE's what you should do:

Contact your bank or card provider as soon as you realise, so that they can cancel the card and issue a replacement.

Keep an eye on your account and scrutinise small contactless payments to make sure they are legit.

If you think your card has been used fraudulently then you should tell your bank or building society and report it to Action Fraud.

Head for Points readers who have called Lloyds in recent days also suffered from long call centre delays.

One customer said: “I had to ring them last night as I had a fraudulent transaction appear in my pending transactions. It does look like there has been a serious breach of security somewhere.”

Simpler internet banking is here with Lloyds bank

While another complained: “My Lloyds Amex was used fraudulently to pay some car parking charges in the US. I think there is a huge data breach here with Lloyds – just hope they only lost card numbers and not all of our personal information.”

This customer added that he spent two hours on the phone with Lloyds this week to fix the issue.

“Same for me – queued for 45 mins on Saturday afternoon to speak to the fraud team after my card was declined – there was an attempted US transaction on there,” one customer said.

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A spokeswoman for Lloyds Bank admitted that “a very small number” of Lloyds Bank Avios Rewards American Express credit card customers have been affected by recent fraudulent activity.

She said: “This has affected less than one per cent of customers who hold these cards and we have introduced additional controls to provide further protection.

“These controls have been successful in ensuring that fraudulent transactions are identified and declined.”

Lloyds apologised to customers for any inconvenience caused and said that impacted customers will receive a full refund of money that have been taken fraudulently.

The Lloyds Bank Avios Rewards credit card account comes with an American Express and MasterCard card to earn Avios (air miles for BA and Iberia) with.

You can earn 1.25 Avios for every £1 spent on the Amex and 1.25 Avios for every £5 spent on the MasterCard.

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